CVPR 2026 Papers

Open-set active learning (OSAL) aims to identify informative samples for annotation when unlabeled data may contain previously unseen classes--a common challenge in safety-critical and open-world scenarios. Existing approaches typically rely on separately trained open-set detectors, introducing substantial training overhead and overlooking the supervisory value of labeled unknowns for improving known-class learning. In this paper, we propose E^2OAL (Effective and Efficient Open-set Active Learning), a unified and detector-free framework that fully exploits labeled unknowns for both stronger supervision and more reliable querying. E^2OAL first uncovers the latent class structure of unknowns through label-guided clustering in a frozen contrastively pre-trained feature space, optimized by a structure-aware F1-product objective. To leverage labeled unknowns, it employs a Dirichlet-calibrated auxiliary head that jointly models known and unknown categories, improving both confidence calibration and known-class discrimination. Building on this, a logit-margin purity score estimates the likelihood of known classes to construct a high-purity candidate pool, while an OSAL-specific informativeness metric prioritizes partially ambiguous yet reliable samples. These components together form a flexible two-stage query strategy with adaptive precision control and minimal hyperparameter sensitivity. Extensive experiments across multiple OSAL benchmarks demonstrate that E^2OAL consistently surpasses state-of-the-art methods in accuracy, efficiency, and query precision, highlighting its effectiveness and practicality for real-world applications. The code is available at github.com/chenchenzong/E2OAL.

Large Multimodal Models (LMMs) have shown remarkable success in visual understanding tasks. LMMs encode visual and textual inputs into tokens, which are then processed by Large Language Models (LLMs). However, the large number of visual tokens poses a major bottleneck for inference efficiency and memory usage. Reducing visual tokens is a promising training-free solution, but existing methods remain limited. Importance-based approaches suffer from poor generalization, are incompatible with kernel-level inference optimizations, and only consider information from a single modality. Diversity-based strategies typically focus on pairwise token redundancy and treat all tokens as equally important. Recent attempts to sequentially combine importance and diversity criteria still fail to address the intrinsic drawbacks of their underlying metrics. To address these limitations, we reformulate visual token reduction as an optimal subset selection problem jointly guided by two complementary objectives: informativeness and coverage. Informativeness is quantified through per-token intrinsic saliency and visual-textual alignment, while coverage is enforced via a volume-based subset selection criterion that ensures global representativeness in the visual feature space. This joint formulation effectively integrates visual saliency, cross-modal alignment, and global coverage in an end-to-end token selection process, yielding a computationally efficient, model-agnostic framework compatible with modern inference accelerators. Extensive experiments demonstrate that CoIn substantially reduces computation and memory cost while maintaining strong task performance.

Look-Up Table based methods have emerged as a promising direction for efficient image restoration tasks. Recent LUT-based methods focus on improving their performance by expanding the receptive field. However, they inevitably introduce extra computational and storage overhead, which hinders their deployment in edge devices.To address this issue, we propose ShiftLUT, a novel framework that attains the largest receptive field among all LUT-based methods while maintaining high efficiency. Our key insight lies in three complementary components. First, Learnable Spatial Shift module (LSS) is introduced to expand the receptive field by applying learnable, channel-wise spatial offsets on feature maps. Second, we propose an asymmetric dual-branch architecture that allocates more computation to the information-dense branch, substantially reducing inference latency without compromising restoration quality.Finally, we incorporate a feature-level LUT compression strategy called Error-bounded Adaptive Sampling (EAS) to minimize the storage overhead.Compared to the previous state-of-the-art method TinyLUT, ShiftLUT achieves a 3.8xlarger receptive field and improves an average PSNR by over 0.21 dB across multiple standard benchmarks, while maintaining a small storage size and inference time.

Turbulence mitigation (TM) is highly ill-posed due to the stochastic nature of atmospheric turbulence. Most methods rely on multiple frames recorded by conventional cameras to capture stable patterns in natural scenarios. However, they inevitably suffer from a trade-off between accuracy and efficiency: more frames enhance restoration at the cost of higher system latency and larger data overhead. Event cameras, equipped with microsecond temporal resolution and efficient sensing of dynamic changes, offer an opportunity to break the bottleneck. In this work, we present EHETM, a high-quality and efficient TM method inspired by the superiority of events to model motions in continuous sequences. We discover two key phenomena: (1) turbulence-induced events exhibit distinct polarity alternation correlated with sharp image gradients, providing structural cues for restoring scenes; and (2) dynamic objects form spatiotemporally coherent "event tubes" in contrast to irregular patterns within turbulent events, providing motion priors for disentangling objects from turbulence. Based on these insights, we design two complementary modules that respectively leverage polarity-weighted gradients for scene refinement and event-tube constraints for motion decoupling, achieving high-quality restoration with few frames. Furthermore, we construct two real-world event-frame turbulence datasets covering atmospheric and thermal cases. Extensive experiments show that EHETM outperforms SOTA methods, especially under scenes with dynamic objects, while reducing data overhead and system latency by approximately 77.3% and 89.5%, respectively.

The recent success of artificial intelligence motivates many non-professional users to train their own models. Those users often resort to cloud training services, seeking to obtain a sufficiently accurate model at a modest cost, for which properly setting up the learning rate and batch size is crucial. While various Hyper-parameter Optimization (HPO) methods have been proposed in that regard, they largely act based on heavy-weight validation signals, being inefficient in the overall cost. We find that the model training process can be viewed as a two-dimensional voting process---with gradients for different iterations and from different samples; moreover, to attain cost-efficient training is to ensure that the gradient redundancy is within a proper range which is similar across diverse models. Based on that insight, we further introduce GR-Gauge, a general method that gauges the gradient redundancy to instruct HPO decisions like configuration searching and trial termination. Extensive experiments demonstrate that GR-Gauge can help attain near-optimal accuracy in much less time than existing methods.

To utilize pre-trained neural networks on edge and mobile devices, we often require efficient adaptation to user-specific runtime data distributions while operating under limited compute and memory resources. On-device retraining with a target dataset can facilitate such adaptations; however, it remains impractical due to the increasing depth of modern neural nets, as well as the computational overhead associated with gradient-based optimization across all layers. Current approaches reduce training cost by selecting a subset of layers for retraining; however, they rely on labeled data, at least one full-model backpropagation, or server-side meta-training, limiting their suitability for constrained devices. We introduce AdaBet, a gradient-free layer selection approach to rank important layers, followed by important channels of these layers, by analyzing topological features of their activation spaces through Betti Numbers and using forward passes alone. AdaBet allows selecting layers and channels with high learning capacity, which are important for retraining and adaptation, without requiring labels or gradients. Evaluating AdaBet on sixteen pairs of benchmark models and datasets shows AdaBet achieves an average gain of 2.5% more classification accuracy over gradient-based baselines while reducing average peak memory consumption by 40%. We open-source our code at https://github.com/Nokia-Bell-Labs/efficient_layer_selection

Refining visual representations by eliminating their internal feature-level redundancy is crucial for simultaneously optimizing the performance and computational cost of models in visual tracking. To enhance their performance, many contemporary Transformer-based trackers leverage a larger number of historical template frames to capture richer spatio-temporal cues. However, this strategy leads to a massive number of input visual tokens. This creates two critical issues: it imposes a quadratic computational burden and can also degrade the tracker's overall performance. To bridge this gap, we propose a compress-then-interact tracking framework, ETCTrack, that learns to efficiently compress template tokens from historical template frames into a robust target representation, moving beyond handcrafted rules. Our method first employs the Adaptive Token Compressor to dynamically construct compact yet highly discriminative template tokens by filtering out redundant visual tokens. These refined template tokens are then processed by our Hierarchical Interaction Encoder to achieve a deep, adaptive interaction with the search features. Refined search features ensure subsequent precise target localization. Experiments on seven benchmarks demonstrate that our method outperforms current state-of-the-art trackers. ETCTrack-B224 reduces the number of template tokens by 60%, leading to a 21.4% reduction in MACs with only a 0.4% drop in accuracy. The source code are available at https://github.com/PJD-WJ/ETCTrack.

Multimodal retrieval is the task of aggregating information from queries across heterogeneous modalities to retrieve desired targets. State-of-the-art multimodal retrieval models can understand complex queries, yet they are typically limited to two modalities: text and vision. This limitation impedes the development of universal retrieval systems capable of comprehending queries that combine more than two modalities. To advance toward this goal, we present OmniRet, the first retrieval model capable of handling complex, composed queries spanning three key modalities: text, vision, and audio. Our OmniRet model addresses two critical challenges for universal retrieval: computational efficiency and representation fidelity. First, feeding massive token sequences from modality-specific encoders to Large Language Models (LLMs) is computationally inefficient. We therefore introduce an attention-based resampling mechanism to generate compact, fixed-size representations from these sequences. This shared module is designed to maintain representational diversity and generalization capabilities while remaining sensitive to modality-specific information. Second, compressing rich omni-modal data into a single embedding vector inevitably causes information loss and discards fine-grained details. We propose Attention Sliced Wasserstein Pooling to preserve these fine-grained details, leading to improved omni-modal representations. OmniRet is trained on an aggregation of approximately 6 million query-target pairs spanning 30 datasets. We benchmark our model on 13 retrieval tasks and a MMEBv2 subset. Our model demonstrates significant improvements on composed query, audio and video retrieval tasks, while achieving on-par performance with state-of-the-art models on others. Furthermore, we curate a new Audio-Centric Multimodal Benchmark (ACM). This new benchmark introduces two critical, previously missing tasks--composed audio retrieval and audio-visual retrieval--to more comprehensively evaluate a model's omni-modal embedding capacity. We believe our benchmark will facilitate the development of universal retrieval systems.